Grotesquerie

by Richard Gavin

  I now have so much to show you, Professor.

  This place, for example: the dank storage locker where I, Maximilian and the others have taken temporary refuge. Instinct instructed me that this city was a good place to stop and try once more to make contact.

  *

  You’ll likely recognize this regulation notebook I’m writing in. It is one of the dozens that I rescued from the ashes of your old schoolhouse. I have stained their leaves with the details of my lavish nightmares, and of the awful waking deeds I’ve committed. (A curious development: I can no longer discern which entries are recollections of my dreams, which the record of my worldly actions.)

  Do you know that I carry with me a charred fragment of the lectern behind which you once preached, Professor? This blackened splinter is reticulated and warped, and perhaps this is apt. Each night I swaddle it inside my jacket, which doubles as my pillow. I do not sleep well upon it.

  Sometimes my fitful slumber is banished by the sound of a school bell. Although I am aware that it is only a passing siren or a car horn or a distant scream, I still instinctively bolt up, thrilled by the possibility that your class is once again in session, that you have returned with fresh teachings from the perimeter.

  Perhaps—may I be forgiven for any hubris—I can teach you some fresh lessons as well. For example, how you would have relished the trip Maximilian, his entourage, and I made to a neglected estuary in that degenerate little town north of the border. There, under a shawl of polluted cumuli, I hearkened to your tales of the great plague ships that had once damned these shores, how that fleet had emerged from a noxious mist; gliding gracefully into port, their rudders manipulated by a fell spirit far beyond mankind’s grasp. You’d said their hulls had been brittle wormwood, their sails the pelts of gods long crucified and flayed, these galleons that crept into port and let their cargo of vermin come vomiting out. Rat backs seething with infected tics, their innards black with disease, these creatures that scuttled into every nook of the city, plopping toxic droppings into the grains, tenderly nibbling on slumbering flesh.

  I did what I could to recreate and reify this myth, Professor, using a special white powder I’d concocted. I watched the Normals wither inside their pathetic little houses, crumpling like puppets with clipped strings. I of course was unaffected, having donned my proper vestments.

  If only you’d been there with me to bask in these delights.

  *

  Maximilian has set up his Observatory in another locker a few doors down from mine. Though he was never part of your class, I always believed he was sympathetic to our cause. The wedding of his technical prowess with my instincts resulted in what might be the best tool a cruddy human has to follow your spectral trail, Professor: the Observatory.

  In the early days, just after your departure, Maximilian seemed to be suitably intrigued by my vigorous hunt for you. My passionate descriptions of your lectures, along with my more persuasive tactics, eventually caused Maximilian to agree to help me find you. He was, I believe, sincerely hoping to meet you, to learn what you had to teach. But as the months crawled past without any sign of your return, Maximilian began to lose patience. Our sessions became briefer and more hopeless in tone. I knew it was only a matter of time before I lost Maximilian.

  When I broke the news to him that we would have to travel further, he was most resistant. It required me to use an even greater incentive, but eventually he acquiesced.

  Earlier today, however, he informed me that he’s had his fill. He begged me to give up the vigil. This (needless to say) will never happen. But I managed to deceive Maximilian into believing that tonight would be our very last attempt to call you back from the rim of the darkness. Based on this lie of finality, Maximilian reluctantly complied.

  *

  As the grey daylight bled out in gloaming, I donned my vestments and set out to meet with Maximilian at his Observatory.

  I feel I should pause here in order to describe my vestments to you, as I’m sure you would approve of their design, which is every bit as pragmatic as it is aesthetic. With my vestments I become the plague doctor of old; guising my face beneath a gasmask with a long beak of black leather. My ratty wide-brim hat adds a ceremonial touch, and my ragged duster coat is suggestive of a shroud. With a walking stick of lashed femurs in hand, I love to stroll the poisoned wastelands.

  Earlier this evening, as I made my way to Maximilian’s locker, the clamped doors became an indistinct swath of corrosion and rust in my peripheral vision. Boulders of grey clouds had smothered the last of the daylight and made the sky appear heavy and low. There was a distant purl of thunder. (The rain never comes.)

  Maximilian was pacing about the Observatory’s open doorway when I arrived. The smoke of one of his trademark black cigars swirled about his head like a personal fog. He was wearing his October Coat; a threadbare dressing gown of silk emblazoned with a tapestry of autumn-coloured leaves. It billowed about him in a dervish sweep. I gave him this coat some months ago, when we began our quest. I made Maximilian promise me to only wear his vestment on auspicious occasions; namely the sessions when we try to Observe you, Professor.

  I waved to him but he did not reciprocate. His first words to me were, “Tonight is the last, J.P.” His tone was one of resignation, even melancholia. “The others and I had a meeting this afternoon and we just can’t do it anymore. If tonight’s probing fails, if we don’t get a response, we’d like your permission to move on.”

  “Move on to where, exactly?” I asked him, hoping he would see that one city is just as doomed as the next. I then enforced the point that my work was not yet done. Maximilian, visibly deflated, flicked his still-fuming cigar onto the littered asphalt. He looked soundlessly skyward. Perhaps for him the clouded constellations offered instruction; I know little of the mechanics of his Observations.

  “Let’s go,” he said coldly before striding back into the Observatory.

  The others were seated around the musty cube of a room. The woman quietly sobbed while mindlessly spinning the gold band on her finger.

  I moved to one of the grubby plastic lawn chairs that were splayed crescent-wise before the hanging bed sheet that doubled as a curtain.

  Maximilian disappeared behind this crude drapery. His and the other shadows beyond it began to move.

  I heard muttering, then the sound of someone screaming.

  The sheet was peeled back, revealing a man; gaunt and naked and quaking. He was seated in a chair made of metal. There were wires taped onto his brow. His limbs were tethered with leather belts.

  Maximilian gave no word of explanation, but our familiarity with the ritual meant none was required.

  He roughly pried the man’s jaws apart in order to administer the tangerine-coloured liquid he regularly prepares in small batches. In no time the lashed man’s screaming ebbed, allowing Maximilian time to check the wires. In a few moments the man’s eyes became like saucers as the lysergic medication took hold.

  Maximilian switched on the antiquated television set that he’d wired up to the man’s head.

  The images on the screen were hazy with snow, but were unquestionably those of some subnatural state, a place replete with monsters; squirming things, things akin to plucked birds or stillborn infants, things that were withered or bloated or mere hissing fog. They swam upon the screen, all these abominations, churning upon & within the fabulous unshaped Dark.

  The lines began to form; a topography of sorts. Waves of ugly dull light, like a phosphorescent sludge, passed across the monitor.

  I rose from my chair in order to better study the screen, to better scry the horrors.

  We were searching for you, Professor, peering like seafaring folk looking into a fog, squinting for the signal fires on the shore. After all, where else might you have gone but beneath the surface?

  But you were not there. We found no sign of you inside that foamy Hell.

  “This specimen should be freed,” Maximilian pleaded. He slapped the tele
vision’s power switch. Of his own accord, Maximilian ordered the woman to “remove him.” Too shocked by this display of insolence, I soundlessly watched as the spindly specimen in the chair was carted off, to where I neither know nor care. Maximilian, head down, stepped out of the room and into the chilly lot beyond it.

  I sat in the Observatory trying to ignore the overwhelming sense of nihilistic hopelessness that was tiding up within me. I looked about the Observatory and saw only blackness; truly the only thing ever witnessed here by Maximilian or me.

  I rose and shuffled outside.

  Maximilian was standing stoically. Bluish smoke streamed from his freshly-lit cigar. His October Coat was wadded on the ground, as though it had been flung there in a rage.

  “No more,” he said beseechingly. “Please, J.P., no more.”

  “We can’t just resign from it,” I said. “It’s a part of us.”

  “It’s a part of you,” he corrected me. “But after all these failures, can you not see that I was right all those months ago?” He sighed, placed his hand on my shoulder. It was the first time he’d touched me in ages. “Things have gotten way out of hand, haven’t they? You’ll admit that, won’t you? This isn’t working and you know it, but you probably don’t know how to make it stop. But I’m telling you, J.P., it’s very easy: just let us go. I want to take my family and leave here, this place. We won’t try to stop you, J.P. We won’t even tell the authorities. I give you my word on that. We don’t want any trouble. We just want your permission to leave.”

  “And go where exactly?” I returned. “The plague’s widespread. It affected more than just Crampton.” (I know it was a lie, Professor, but at the time I was desperate to maintain your vigil.)

  “We’re willing to risk it, J.P. Let us go.”

  I started to laugh. It was a reaction that shocked me just as much as it did Maximilian, who glared at me with disdain.

  “You really don’t get Nobody’s message at all, do you?” he spat.

  “Why don’t you enlighten me?” I said, angered by the insolent suggestion that he could comprehend your little lectures on horror better than I do.

  Maximilian ground the cigar under the toe of his shoe. “It’s horribly simple. Think for a moment and you’ll get it. The message is; there is nothing to do, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be, and most importantly, there is nobody to find. There is no Professor Nobody! There never has been! It’s you, J.P. It’s you.”

  “…preposterous…” I muttered. “…absurd …”

  Maximilian held up his hands. “Think back. I was your therapist, remember? Your parents sent you to me because you were suffering delusions. There was no Professor Nobody, no plague. You killed them with homemade anthrax. I was there. I saw it. Then you took us; my wife, my son…

  “We’re not your ‘companions,’ J.P., we’re hostages, prisoners. And we want you to let us go. It’s over, J.P. I’ve been trying to help you see that for weeks now, trying to get you to turn yourself in. But I’m giving up on that. You can keep searching for Professor Nobody if you want to. I won’t stop you. But I’m asking you to let us go. Maybe you’ll do better trying to find him on your own…”

  *

  I don’t remember restoring my companions or leaving the Observatory. The next thing I recall is slumping down upon the curb and staring down at the trash heaped there; old wadded newspaper that scuttled from the slightest breeze, and mashed beer cans. Someone had twisted some plastic drinking straws into a rudimentary effigy of a human figure. I stared at its knotted limbs for a little while, wondering if this was the final you had mentioned.

  Was this your litmus test to distinguish the true macabrists from the dabblers?

  Even if I was wrong in my theory, it was still the only logical next step in the process of the search for you, Professor.

  I gathered my ritual implements and returned to the Observatory in the wee hours. Just as I had done with the schoolhouse after you’d abandoned it, or with the white powder I unleashed around the town: I blasphemed in order to send you a Calling.

  Maximilian and the others were chained to the wall, slumbering on the Observatory floor, looking like well-fed slugs in their sleeping bags. The chains that bound them looked like spun silver under my lantern light.

  As the signal pyre blazed, I stood and watched it through the jaundiced lenses of my plague doctor mask. I saw one of the figures inside trying ineptly to escape, to break their bonds while the flames scurried up their limbs in waves. They resembled fire-tarantulas, scuttling up and down the walls, leaving vastation in their wake.

  I had hoped this arachnid light would have guided you, like a plague-ship being navigated safely to shore.

  A little while ago, I indulged in a tour of the leavings, and inside I found a marvellous treat: one of the skulls had its jaws welded into a perpetual shriek, and the gold in its teeth shone like beetles’ backs.

  But as exquisite as this horror was, I am still left wanting.

  *

  How like the thunderheads you are, Professor. You prowl the sky, near enough for me to sense you but far enough away for me to doubt your presence. And like those prowling clouds that never unleash their rains, you never fulfill your promise.

  Who shall swallow these horrors with me? Who out there can comprehend the poetry of this half-toppled abattoir land?

  Who else might draw equal delight from this endless nightmare of being?

  And the storm in my head rumbles its retort:

  Who understands this horror?

  Nobody.

  Nobody…

  The Sullied Pane

  “If you’re really worried about your parents suspecting us, you might want to wipe that ridiculous grin off your face before we go down to dinner,” Maxine said, giving him a coquettish wink. She looped the straps of her bra back onto her shoulders, then turned her back to Xavier in a wordless request for his fingers to re-clasp what they’d so nimbly unfastened a few moments earlier.

  Gently, he pressed his face into the soft nest of her hair, which smelled of sea air and spices. “Give me a moment to come down,” Xavier joked in whisper. “I’ll have my poker face on before the salad’s served, trust me.”

  “Oh? Is this the sort of thing you’ve done often?”

  While still technically a newlywed, Xavier knew his bride well enough to spy that telltale hitch of the corner of her perfect mouth; the seed of a smile that she was struggling to hide from him. It was a reassuring sign that her question was not an earnest one.

  “Hardly,” he replied. “I just know my family. The law of survival is simple: show no emotion, expect none in return. Do that and we’re fine.”

  Maxine’s brow furrowed in consternation. “We’re in the home of the grand Whitlocks; it’s a palace. Stop making it sound like we’re entering a war room.”

  “There may be war if we don’t get this bed remade exactly as Mother had it when we arrived!”

  Together they moved about the mattress, which was still warm and tousled from the frantic, hushed coupling they’d snuck in just after their arrival at the grand house.

  Once the bed had been reasonably restored, Maxine dabbed the sheen of sweat from her brow. “How does your mother keep this place so pristine without a housekeeper? Honestly!” she huffed.

  “My brothers and I have been asking that question all our lives. My father has hired a dozen cleaners over the years to try and ease the burden, but Mother always lets them go.” Xavier shrugged. “Maybe it’s her way of contributing, who knows?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My family’s money all came from my father’s side. He took over the business interests from my grandfather before my parents were even married, and he’s handled everything ever since. Once my brothers and I were all grown, I think my mother got lost…maybe even a bit resentful.”

  “Resentful of what, the conniving harlots of the outside who bewitched and stole her boys from her?”

  Xavier lifted
his hands. “Easy,” he said. “This isn’t some Freudian family drama. There’s no Oedipal anything here. My mother didn’t get jealous or angry after we moved out. She just kind of…drifted. She kept house, walked the grounds, sort of disappeared inside herself for a long time.”

  “And that’s why her invitation to spend New Years’ here surprised you so much?”

  “Yes,” he said, coiling his arms around her. “I wasn’t shut out because you and I eloped. All my brothers and I had nothing but radio silence from the home front.”

  “Until now?”

  “Until now.”

  *

  Their walk to the dining room was, to Maxine’s mind, more akin to a museum tour than the surveying of a homestead. Every inch of the abundant walnut wood gleamed as though it was encased in glass. The carpet that lined the grand staircase bore the swirl patterns of vigorous vacuuming. The walls all looked to be freshly painted, and the air was fragrant with lemon oil. But these details quickly paled in Maxine’s awareness, which was growing evermore focused on her internal anxieties. She could feel the familiar invisible vise clamping over her lungs, and was relieved when Xavier, perhaps able to sense her inner workings, slipped his hand into hers and lovingly whispered an instruction for her to breathe. He stopped her at the bottom of the stairs and kissed her lips before escorting her into the dining hall.

  The room was like a film set, so grand was its elegance, so meticulous its maintenance and design. At first Maxine was so taken with the scope of the French windows that composed three walls of the hall, that she scarcely registered the carved table that seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other, or the highbacked plush dining chairs, or the fire that roared inside a maw-like hearth of green marble. Opera music strained from speakers that must have been hidden amidst the bookcases. The panelled wall bore family portraits in oil. There was a large standing globe and an antique bronze telescope by the spacious windows.